Law and order in the post-coeducation era

In the breaking light of Coxsackie, New York, which yawns its way 100 miles from Scarsdale up the Bronx River Parkway, Richard Herrin SY ’75 thought he saw a sign.

It was around 6 am on July 7, 1977 when Herrin parked a stolen car outside St. Mary’s Church on Mansion Street, figuring the House of God as good a house as any to confess to the murder of his girlfriend of over two years, Bonnie Garland SY ’78. He’d been on the run since 2 am, contemplating suicide. “I’m going to turn this over to someone else now,” he later recalled thinking.

Shirtless, barefoot, and peppered in Garland’s blood, the 23-year-old Herrin banged a few times on the door of a refectory. On the other side was—in the strictly legal sense, as it would turn out—the consummate deliverer of Herrin’s sins: the Catholic Church.

“I killed my girlfriend,” he told Father Paul Tartaglia. According to Tartaglia’s 1978 testimony, that conversation lasted about 25 minutes, after which the pastor contacted the Coxsackie police at Herrin’s behest. In court, Tartaglia would describe Herrin as a “very positive and beautiful” person dealing as responsibly as possible with the consequences of a momentary crime of passion.

As 20-year-old Bonnie Garland lay dying in her Scarsdale, N.Y. bed, barely sustaining three massive claw-hammer blows to the head, her murderer was being welcomed into the fold—becoming the victim. That fold was a particularly contentious guild of advocates that would come to include two highly vocal Yale assistant chaplains and dozens upon dozens of on- and off-campus supporters.

In the following year they would raise 30,000 dollars for his legal fees, hire Jack T. Litman of later “Preppie Murder” fame for his defense, and substantially reduce his sentence from that of first-degree murder to non-negligent manslaughter. In short, they would ensure that Richard Herrin could one day walk among us.

Inconceivably—somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area—he does.

The Tues., Sept. 8, 2009 murder of Annie Le MED ’13 is the fifth killing of a Yale student to occur within the past 40 years, a milestone which happens—not surprisingly—to coincide with the first arrival of women at Yale College. What follows is not a polemic on the nature of sexual violence on Yale campus, but a cautionary tale of how sexual, classist, and cultural prevarications can adversely affect the processes of justice.

At the present date, the fate of Le’s killer appears determined and transparent. Investigators claim to have a “very strong case” against Raymond Clark III, the former lab technician now under arrest for Le’s murder, and it appears that they do. A whirlwind tripartite investigation by the Yale Police, New Haven Police Department, and FBI precipitated Clark’s arrest, just four days after agents discovered Le’s body in an electrical chase between the basement walls of 10 Amistad St. on Sun., Sept. 13, the day she planned to marry her fiancé. It remains to be seen the extent to which the so far shrouded circumstances of Le and Clark’s personal lives will influence the outcome of the trial.

Should the trial proceed fairly and without any grievous misstep on the part of investigators and attorneys, Clark’s conviction and due incarceration will represent not only justice for Le’s family and those affected by the tragedy of her death, but some transitive form of justice for these previously slain students whose killers continue to walk among us as free citizens.

The passage of time has enhanced the extent to which the aftermaths of these heinous crimes are examinable. Until now, the powers that be–those authorities responsible for investigation and retribution in New Haven and elsewhere–have yet to win the public’s admiration for the handling of any murder involving enrolled students in the past four decades.

A new era began on September 15, 1969, and with it came a different context in which to examine such crimes. Women have attended Yale’s graduate programs since 1876, but the epoch of on-campus violence in which Suzanne Jovin DC ’99, Garland, and Le died is a distinctly new and infinitely more controversial one than those that came before it.

Richard Herrin was never concerned with academics. The only social outlet of his four years at Yale was the church, writes Willard Gaylin, M.D., in The Killing of Bonnie Garland: A Question of Justice. Saint Thomas More is where Herrin met Sister Ramona Peña and where Bonnie Garland also occasionally went to pray. Apart from the church and his girlfriend, Herrin kept a low profile at Yale. Later Herrin’s homicidal tendency would be framed—in his legal defense—as a reaction to the stifling climate of elitism he encountered as a Mexican-American affirmative action student at Yale.

To Professor Donald Kagan, who began teaching at Yale in 1969, the quest for overarching historical perspectives on Yale violence is essentially misbegotten. “Events like this happen and they happen everywhere,” he contends, “Crime is, as the Bible would tell us, as old as Cain and Abel.”

Though in a phone interview last night he looked to antediluvian times for an analog to the Le slaying, Kagan drew a blank when asked if he could recall the Garland murder of 1977. Everyone seems to be drawing a blank. The murder itself elicited only a single article in the pages of the following year’s Yale Daily News. And it was hardly a summary one, only reporting that Herrin had been jailed. In comparison to contemporary reporting on Le’s murder, Garland had earned only a clause.

“The murder that changed it all” screamed the YDN headline of Andrew Paciorek’s ten-year retrospective on the murder of Christian Prince, PC ’93. Published Febuary 17, 2001—ten years to day after Christian fell on the steps of St. Mary’s Church on Hillhouse Avenue—Paciorek’s article reconstructed the events of the evening, alluded to the ensuing courtroom battles that resulted in a diminished sentence for Prince’s most likely killer, and posited various ways in which Prince’s tragic and murder “shocked Yale and cast doubt on its safety.”

Sometime between 1 and 1:15 am on Feburary 17, 1999, Prince was heading back from a party at SSS to his off-campus apartment on Whitney Avenue. While his friend went in the other direction for pizza, Prince decided he wanted a good night’s sleep before the following day’s lacrosse game.

By their own accounts, Newhallville residents James Duncan Fleming and Randy Fleming (no relation) were driving around Yale’s campus after a nearby rap concert when the pair came across Prince at the base of Hillhouse Avenue.

The two Newhallville teenagers parked the car and approached Prince. Confronting him on the steps of the church, they threatened him with a gun and demanded Prince’s money. Although Prince complied, as Randy later would testify in court, Duncan Fleming still proceeded to pistol-whip him in the face. Prince fell to the ground, at which point Duncan Fleming said, “I ought to shoot this cracker.” According to Randy’s initial testimony, Duncan Fleming then fired a single shot into Prince’s body.

Forty minutes after he and his friends had parted way outside SSS, a passing driver noticed someone lying in the road. At 1:43 am he was rushed to Yale-New Haven hospital. At 2:06 am he was pronounced dead. “More than 1,000 mourners came to Prince’s funeral in Washington, D.C., including many of Prince’s friends from Yale,” the Paciorek article reported.

No court, however, has ever conclusively ruled that either of the two men who attempted to steal Prince’s wallet also shot and murdered him. (Mysteriously, detectives discovered Prince’s wallet only 100 feet from his body.) But once prosecutors had him on the stand and under oath, Randy recanted his story. “I said it but it ain’t true,” he said. Almost a year after giving his original testimony to the police, Randy insisted: “They pressured me. They’d give me so much time I wouldn’t believe it—I couldn’t see my mother; I had no lawyer; what could I do?”

Prince’s murder changed Yale in that it brought about a new system of surveillance, the installation of new street-lamps, a new budget for late-night shuttle services, and a new awareness of town-gown racial tensions. But in another sense, it maintained the status quo.

Without the earlier testimony of Randy Fleming and lacking concrete physical evidence, a re-trail jury only convicted James Duncan Fleming of conspiracy to rob Prince. Of felony murder and attempted robbery Fleming was acquitted. He served nine years in prison for the conspiracy conviction.

The facts of the cold case of Suzanne Jovin DC ’99 are already well-known, exceptionally well-known. In the absence of “closure,” conspiracy theories abound. Despite repeated pleas that NHPD forensic experts test—for the first time—a Fresca bottle believed to contain DNA evidence, the case remains unsolved.

Suzanne Jovin was not sexually assaulted. Nor was she robbed. Sources close to her reported that she was happy with her boyfriend, Roman. Unless Jovin’s killing was a truly randomized event and she was killed by an anonymous drifter—which is unlikely given that she appears to have been brought in a car not against her will from outside Phelps Gate to the top of Science Hill—the motives involving the subject of her senior essay are, to many, the last feasible potentialities of what might actually have happened.

A source familiar with Jovin’s senior essay, which the Yale political science department would not release, said he considers what he has read of the conclusion to be vague and “not particularly revelatory,” especially for the thesis’s lack of primary sourcing. “The value was that she was writing about Bin Laden at a time when not many people in the Political Science world were paying much attention to him.”

Killtown.blogspot.com is a website dedicated to “Questioning 9/11 attacks…[sic].” Another blog, rumormillnew.org, houses a story supposedly written on October 7, 2001 entitled “Susan Jovin: The First Victim of September 11th.” Despite a lack of any real journalistic credibility, one sentence stands out, “Nothing about the murder of Suzanne Jovin makes any sense if normal standards of investigation are used.” Indeed, the sense of many is that only outlandish circumstantial evidence remains.

Less commonly reported on than the pristinely mysterious circumstances surrounding her death is the simple fact that Susan had not one but two faculty advisors on her nearly-completed senior essay on the growing threat of Osama Bin Laden and the al Queda terrorist organization: The first was Professor James Van de Velde, the former dean of Saybrook College and lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Intelligence (Reserves); The other was Professor Charles Hill, Diplomat-in-Residence and a lecturer in International Studies.

Speaking over the phone Thursday evening, Hill showed measured optimism that the case would eventually be solved: “I believe this case could be solved…just not anytime soon,” he said. Hill saw more differences than similarities between the murders of Jovin and Le. “Like President Levin said, [Le’s murder] could have happened anywhere,” whereas Jovin’s murder could have only happened at Yale, he said, though Hill refused to elaborate beyond that sentiment.

The onus of justice, served accurately and swiftly, weighs more heavily on today’s police and FBI coalition than ever before. Comparatively, it seems to have lived up to the climate of heightened responsibility on campus. Like Professor James Van De Velde implicated in the murder of Suzanne Jovin 11 years ago, Clark was named a suspect within two weeks of the crime; but unlike the case of Van De Velde, New Haven police wasted no time or effort in pumping the 24-year-old suspect for information. Van De Velde gave an interview to the Yale Daily News asking that police give him a polygraph test, perhaps a conspicuously earnest mark of his cooperation. Clark received a polygraph test only days after Le’s murder.

“While we are left only to mourn Bonnie’s tragic death,” wrote Richard Herrin’s former Yale roommate Ashbel “A.T.” Wall II, “It is important, that having lost one life, we do what we can to salvage another.”

This was part of a letter Wall forwarded to several parties of the Yale community a week after the murder, written in the obvious interest of Herrin’s bail application. Much of the Catholic response on campus was understandably sympathetic—assistant chaplains Ramona Pena and Peter Fagan immediately attended to Herrin’s cause.

Mr. Wall, currently the award-winning Director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, refused to communicate with the Herald. His recent dissertation on safety and abuse in America’s prison infrastructure strongly suggests a view of the justice system more punitive than rehabilitative. Wall seems, then, to have made a major exception for the case of his friend and former roommate Herrin, who in Wall’s imagination deserved a specific brand of sympathy.

This was the same finagled case of mental instability and overarching mercy that characterized the 1987 “Preppie Murder” trial of Robert Chambers. The female victim of that crime, Jennifer Levin, was comparably decried by attorney Jack T. Litman as a “minx,” a deceptively sexual and “promiscuous” girl wont to inspire the angers and sexual blights of potentially homicidal men. Bonnie Garland, the buxom flame-haired freshman and Proof of the Pudding member who’d ignited Richard Herrin’s troubled heart, was portrayed along conspicuously similar lines. This is, perhaps, what some annals of American culture refer to as Litman’s “blame the victim” style of defense.

In this portrait of the tragic romance, the humble Richard Herrin was a victim of Yale in all its possible permutations. Despite having been valedictorian of his 450-plus high school class in Los Angeles, Herrin exhibited no palpable interest in Yale academic, extracurricular, or social life in his time here. The second-generation Yalie Bonnie Garland at once electrified his notions of social inferiority and sexual passion. The two dated for a little over two years. Upon her announcement, in letter form, that she’d like to start exploring other men, Herrin lost control.

What comes through in Dr. Willard Gaylin’s painstaking account of Herrin’s trial is not acute insanity, but stupidity, a conceptual inability to acknowledge the already-tenuous nature of his and Garland’s relationship. Gaylin, a psychology professor at Columbia, was so moved by this thoroughly modern example of injustice that he wrote a book on it.

“To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior,” Gaylin said, “And then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.” And comparing the views of Wall and Gaylin, what of that quaintly platonic notion that we, the living, live the lives of the dead? That we represent their fury, their anguish, their otherwise unspeakable defense? No sheer force of war-mongering could bring poor Bonnie Garland, Suzanne Jovin, or Annie Le back from the dead, but at least the living might entertain some notion of justice served appropriately cold.

“My approach to this is more Tolstoyan than anything else,” said Professor Kagan, “He tends to look at human events as controlled by things larger than anything we can understand. The only decent solution is to mourn the loss.”

By Cally Fiedorek and Jay Dockendorf

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